I will study the changing childbirth experiences of American women during the years 1750-1950. This period witnessed major changes in childbirth practices: from midwife to physician attended births, from home to hospital birth location, and from minimal to high intervention deliveries. In short, childbirth changed from a natural, if risky, woman-centered event in the home to a medically managed and highly technological event taking place in a sterile surgical atmosphere. The object of the study is to analyze the processes by which these changes occurred and to measure their impact on women's experiences of birth. A monograph reinterpreting the history of childbirth will be the result of this study. Historians heretofore have concluded that the medicalizaton of childbirth and the increases of technical interventions in birth occurred because physicians imposed their will on birthing women. It is my hypothesis that the childbirth techniques which became common in this period -- forceps, anesthesia, episiotomy -- met the needs and desires both of the women and their medical birth attendants. For different reasons both groups sought the aid of scientific advances. Historians have usually concluded that the entrance of male physicians into normal obstetrics in the last third of the eighteenth century unalterably changed the childbirth experience for women and took away its traditional female character. In contrast, I hypothesize that the twentieth century move to the hospital was the single most important transition point in childbirth history. During the long history of home birth, women's familiarity with their physical location and their dominance over the domestic sphere offered comfort regardless of the actual delivery process. Birth remained a woman centered event in the home, even when male physicians were in attendance. But when birth moved to the hospital, women lost this important female oriented component of traditional birthings. Systematic examinations of medical journals and texts will be essential for this study. Similarly, I will be using women's diaries, letters, and autobiographies that include childbirth accounts. I will also examine hospital records and contemporary official reports.